Unsolicited Advice

People ask you all kinds of nosy personal questions when you show up out of the blue. You are not required to answer them. People get really distressed about this sometimes, but in an amazing coincidence, this is not your problem. You don't need to know anything about other people to help them. They don't need to know anything about you, either. You do kind of need to figure out what they need helping with, however, before you make the mess worse. You can fix an astonishing number of things with a screwdriver and some string, as long as you also have ingenuity. Never assume something is out to kill you unless it is, right at that exact moment, actively trying to kill you. Better to start out with greetings rather than exchange of fire if you can manage it. Unless they're Daleks. Then you run like hell until you can find a gun that gets through dalekanium. Always make sure that your overcoat has as many pockets as you think you'll need. And, whenever possible, at

Rather than buy bags of designated rat food, I feed my critters a mix of basic human foodstuffs, supplemented by my own leftovers. Their diet should be mostly carbs (i.e., grains), and one of the cheapest ways to do this is to feed the little boogers a lot of oatmeal. I can't stand the stuff, so normally I just buy big canisters of whatever brand of rolled oats is on sale and feed them cold porridge for breakfast, but this week the supermarket happened to have packets of "fruit-and-cream flavored" oatmeal on sale. They like fruit, they like cream, and they like oatmeal, so I figured I'd pick it up and give them sweetened cardboard-sludge every once in a while as a treat. They got "bananas and cream" today . They are adamant that this is not  their beloved cold porridge. Don't get me wrong, they demolished it -- they just had to sniff it a lot first. They have a point. Given the smell of it, I'd say it's not "bananas and cream" so much

One of the other desk attendants laughed at me when I told her that Ye Interesting Person set off my Genius Kid Detector. I wish I could explain better how that worked. I can usually pinpoint the look or comment that set it off the first time, but explaining  why  that set it off is much more difficult. I have an imperfect record of setting out my case without using words like "timey-wimey ball". I also told her that something he'd done tipped me off to the fact that he'd taken a lot of math. She told me she thought I was reading too much into it. Nuts to that -- I'm right on that stuff orders of magnitude more often than I'm wrong. Inductive reasoning about other brains is fun stuff. It relies on having a vast store of patterns, both of behavior and of the characteristic thinking styles that go with a wide variety of specializations, to compare and contrast. It also impresses the hell out of everybody, except the other people who have worked out the same

Random cultural note of the day: I'm told that in the Marvel vs Capcom games, one of Phoenix Wright's support characters is the police dog Missile, who figures in a couple different cases of the original trilogy. Americans might not immediately recognize the breed, but Missile is a shiba inu . His alternate "costumes" correspond to the various combinations of coat markings and color officially recognized for the breed. The Japanese find it hilarious whenever Missile comes up, as if Gumshoe had promised Phoenix and Maya a working K9 unit, and then shown up with a yappy, derpy little Maltese stuffed into a tote bag. Centuries ago, shiba inu were mountainside hunting dogs, used in a terrier-like fashion to chase small game out from behind rocks and under bushes. Modern Japanese consider them to be prissy, expensive house pets. Like other Asian spitzes, they're clever, but also prone to snapping at things and very slow to warm to strangers and other dogs -- althou

I'm not a big tea person. I'm not a big wine person either. My working theory is that I don't like the taste of tannin. (Grape wine, anyway. Plum wine, umeshuu  in Japanese, is great stuff with dessert.) Plain Darjeeling tastes like mulch water to me. Earl Grey is drinkable if I dump in an amount of milk and sugar that would horrify actual Brits. I keep trying anyway, because I already don't like coffee, beer, or caviar, and I carry a tiny video game machine with me everywhere I go -- I'm afraid if too many people find out about it, they'll take away my adulting license. Explaining to people that you don't like tea that tastes like tea will get you looked at funny. The easiest way to avoid this is to instead cultivate a taste for exotic forms of tea whose names are not in English. Bonus points if you pick something that Americans couldn't pronounce correctly if their lives depended on it. "Chai" works all right, but "mugicha", "

Whole fruit.  I used to give our first set of rats a whole clementine orange and let them argue over it. Eventually one of them figured out the best way to take possession of it was to get there first, open his mouth as wide as he could, gator-style, sink his teeth into the peel, and then just let go of the cage bars. He landed with an almighty WHOMPH in the bedding on the bottom of the cage, with an orange fully half as big as he was in his mouth. It took them a day or so, but eventually I could reach into the cage and fish out a perfectly clean orange peel, intact but for one hole, just about the size of a rat face. The guys I have now think that eviscerating a whole banana is loads of fun. Uncooked pasta.  I feed them dried rotini and elbows and stuff on a regular basis, just so they have something they can nibble on to keep their teeth worn down, but the entertainment value of pasta varies directly with its length. Comedy is feeding an eight-inch rat a ten-inch piece of uncooked

Jesus Christ, I feel like I've been drowning over here. Too many smaller things to deal with can be just as catastrophic as a couple of HUGE things hitting at the same time. Trying to cover a bunch of stuff I've missed over the past couple of weeks: Tabbiewolf was good enough to whip up a sketch -- and even color it! -- after I got curious enough to ask what kind of critter she thought I'd be. (Normally people go straight for 'fox', probably because of the red hair and va-va-voom.) Tabbiewolf is a freelance artist specializing in toonified critter avatars and the like, so if happen to be looking for one, head on over and ask about projects. She drew me as a bobcat, which is one I've never gotten before. Cute, non ? I sent her to my online portfolio for reference images, and I am amused to note that I apparently really am that busty. I don't tend to think of myself as top-heavy, especially since one of my best friends has knockers literally the size of he

Let's check the weather forecast for the next day or two, shall we? Hm. Tornadoes in the Bayou, says The Weather Channel. Apparently we're all gonna die. Snow in the Deep South. Also all gonna die. Still digging out the Midwest. All gonna die. Round two of whatever that was that soaked NoCal expected. Gonna die, usw . Winter Storm Euclid (wait, we're naming all our precipitation now?) scheduled to sweep across the entire country, leaving chaos in its wake. We're all definitely gonna die. Except me, apparently. Boston is scheduled to be cloudy and just around freezing, at about 50% relative humidity, with light snowfall starting early Christmas Day and tapering to a stop right around sunset. The airport hasn't even noticed, and they're prone to issuing warnings whenever they feel the tarmac will be slightly damper than normal. I feel almost guilty. Also, have a random space-related Christmas story .

Things I do when actual work doesn't take up  quite enough processing cycles to keep me from getting horribly bored: Watch documentaries in languages I don't technically speak. So far I'm running about 30% comprehension on a thing on eating disorders which is entirely in Dutch. It sounds a lot like Hochdeutsch with a very French accent, although by saying that I probably just managed to insult all three countries involved. I used BBC Radio Cymru for a while, but it turns out that most radio in Welsh is just as boring as most radio in English. The main point of Radio Verda is to be in Esperanto, and consequently their content is very scattershot and mostly inane. Taunt rats. Getting peanut butter on their tails keeps them deliciously occupied for quite a while. Read up on murder and horrible transit disasters. I don't really like all the death per se , but for some reason those occasions are the only times in our culture where it's acceptable to collect endless

Captain Awkward's guest blogger Cliff Pervocracy has written another extremely sensible column about how pretty is totally optional . Cliff and other commenters have totally nailed the actual discussion, but I've noticed that more than one person asking "How do other women DO that?" sort of in passing, and expressing the feeling that they somehow inadvertently missed like an entire semester of girl class or something, because everyone else seems to know what's going on and they don't. If you're getting this impression from glancing at "beauty" mags and not being able to comprehend a damn thing they say, don't sweat it. Their "style" and "makeup" tutorials are written by idiots. Aside from being prescriptivist in a social sense and often bafflingly fucking wrong in a psychological, historical, and aesthetic-theory-and-arts sense, their target audience is invariably assumed to already know what's going on. Not one of t

Sometimes I wonder what the hell I'm doing with my life. Then I get a Facebook comment from a photo studio intern whose primary function is "hair wizard" that uses the words 'anachronistically', 'trans-located' and 'Age of Enlightenment' in a syntactically-correct manner in a joke , and I wonder why I didn't shove all the important shit into a My Little Pony backpack and hitchhike right the fuck back out here twenty-five years ago. Christ, but Arizona is a sucking hole in the face of civilization. Living there has also left me woefully unprepared for New England in many ways, I've come to realize. For example, I haven't the foggiest fucking clue what to do about any natural disaster that doesn't involve venomous wildlife or being baked into a mummy by a cruel and uncaring sun. I have mad survival skills when it comes to shaking centipedes out of rarely-used shoes, and hauling one bottle of water per person her hour along like some

One of the rats did a weird thing the other day, so I decided to look it up online. It turned out to be not very important. The fat one was doing a sort of waggly-irritated-tail-shimmy, which I correctly guessed meant the same thing in rat as it does in cat: That the owner of the tail has been briefly but profoundly annoyed when, for example, he wants to move but one of his less-bright littermates is sitting firmly on his head. Every time I go look up something rat-related, I am again bowled over by how complicated and pernickety people can get about this. There are guides, pages and pages long, that purport to tell you how the rat feels about you by interpreting every last little nuance of his body language. Do people really have a problem figuring this out? I never did. Rats, you see, are terrible physicists. They're still ambivalent about gravity. Had Sir Isaac Newton been a rat, his first priority would have been eating his way into the free apple that had just plummeted

Another bit of my interesting brain-weird has to do with glasses. I'm mildly nearsighted. Not very much -- just enough to annoy me. I can't see street signs at the end of the block and I lean in a few inches to use the computer. Normally I wear contact lenses, which are actually nineteen different kinds of awesome. I'm one of those lucky people who can tolerate extended-wear hydrogel contacts, which means that I get to stick them to the fronts of my eyeballs and then forget about them for a month at a time. Laypersons like to shriek in horror when I say that and try to tell my that my eyes are going to shrivel up and fall out, but I always have to specify that I want overnight lenses when I get a checkup because the doctor can't tell, so I'm thinking I'm doing okay. Very rarely do I have any issues with this. I have more problems with dryness and weird sensations with them out, in fact; I've been wearing various kinds of bionic eyeballs since I was fourtee

While I've been working and sewing and primping and occasionally feeding the rodents entire bananas because I like to see them pretend to be little cave-rats falling upon a whole dead mammoth in their savage hunger (not very well -- I should note here that if I don't pull some of the peel off the banana, it takes them a good long while to scrape together the motivation to chew their way into it), I've had a constant stream of stuff running on YouTube. Most of it has been a British show called QI . QI  is technically what's known as a panel quiz -- these are not much seen on American TV anymore, although they were popular on the radio in the 1940s and 50s. The object is not so much to know everything and be right, as it is to share random information and be hilarious. Hollywood Squares  is probably the closest that's been on TV, although it's been off the air for a while, and in that case the celebrity squares got to be funny while the competitors were alarming

Since I still haven't gotten the go-ahead from the other humans I want to show off, today I am going to brag about costuming rodents. When I lived in Flagstaff, we had a cage of three rats. Well, we -- the tool-making symbolic language-using humans -- thought we had a cage of three rats. They were of the opinion that we had one rat, one rat, and one rat. Rats have a very toddler-esque, self-centered view of the world, which often leads to things like me knitting a hammock sized for one rat and hanging it in the cage, only to come back later and find all three of them piled into it. Each one had found it and thought, "Well, I'm  only one rat, surely  I will fit!" because of course the other two rats don't count. (The same principle allows you to fit about a kilo of rat into a standard rectangular Kleenex box, but only if they like each other. Found that out in the vet's waiting room. The density of rat, if you're interested, is about 1.05g/cm 3 at thei

It's that time of year again, when I brag about my costuming exploits. I was in Flagstaff for about a decade, and in that time, I ended up sort of the de factor  designer for Halloween outfits -- various and sundry people helped with the manufacturing, but since for some reason I can apparently think in floppy wireframe, I was almost always the one who headed the charge around JoAnn Fabrics for patterns and textiles and notions. One of my really terrible urges that I probably shouldn't confess to in public is the one where I keep wanting to use other people as walking dressforms. Moggie puts up with it, from time to time; she's fun to design for because she's built almost exactly like Agatha Heterodyne and gets happier and happier the more buttons and zippers and pockets you add. She also has endless patience for the part where we sit around drinking and talking about stupid things, and she wanders back and forth to the sewing machine whenever I finish pinning someth

It has been brought to my attention that I keep referring to my laptop as 'she'. This is entirely correct. There is a significant bias to pareidolia that leads to seeing similarities to human qualities in things that aren't -- this is why we see faces in car grilles and Jesus in toast, rather than collections of random shapes. Once a system -- any system, but particularly one with which I can interact in real-time -- gets complicated enough that it's no longer entirely predictable, it becomes much easier to think of it as an analogue to a human personality, and to speak of it in those terms. I'm aware that what I'm seeing is a rule system of which I do not have full knowledge and for which I therefore can only make statistical predictions, but this is effectively the same way I deal with squidgy unknowable humans, and my intuition works much better when I let myself think of it in terms of what the computer (car, train, algorithm, console, river, whatever) 

I witnessed a rat physically learn something the other day. I got the see the actual moment where that last little neuron made the connection in his brain. Well, second-hand, at least; sometimes the rats haven't really got their heads screwed on straight, but their calvaria are all firmly in place. I've switched rooms in the apartment, and since my new one doesn't have a scalding hot radiator for them to get stuck under or any outlets low enough for them to jam their little noses into, I've been shutting all the doors and clearing the floor of delicious things and letting them just run around while I work on stuff at the desk. They have the entire open floor of my bedroom to waddle around on, so of course they spend most of their time clustered in the packing box I've given them for a home base, chewing on each other under a tatty blanket. I always know where at least two of them are without looking, just by following the indignant >SQK!< >SQK!< noises

If anyone was wondering where I get some of the supplemental stuff for Sherlock , there are actually a small collection of tie-in sites for the series online. Aside from a few scattered things on the BBC site itself -- which tend to not work for US fans without a proxy -- there are also a tiny set of mock blogs and other sites set up in sort of mini-ARG fashion. The most useful one, of course, is John's blog , but from there you can also get to Sherlock's site (the same one John admitted finding in "A Study In Pink" when he looked Sherlock up, and the one Sherlock posts his answers to in "The Great Game") and Molly's blog, and a few other things. John's blog is from whence the fandom gets a lot of things like the name of John's therapist, and some tantalizing bits of write-up about unaired cases. I don't know who's behind it, but the general accuracy to the on-screen stuff suggests that it's Gatiss and Moffatt, or one of the other f